Abstract

Critics usually see in one of Arthur Rimbaud's most obscure prose poems, H, an allegory of masturbation, disguised here as a timeless feminine figure whom the poet calls Hortense and whose identity the reader is invited to discover. But such a name refers to gardens, plants and flowers (hortus), and thus connects this poem to many other of Rimbaud's verses, where such a link exists between flowers and sexuality. It would appear that H is but a rewriting of Vowels, a sonnet often seen as Rimbaud's masterpiece. Behind the enigmatic prose poem about auto-eroticism we find a mere display of autotextual degradation: the poet touching up his own verses.